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controlled the emperor. The only strength that the emperor retained was
his potential power as a symbolic head of state, deriving from the unbroken
hereditary line of the imperial family, which could be traced back to
the sixth century ad. The executors of the coup d’état of 1868 utilized this
potency fully. By claiming to ‘restore ’ the emperor to power, they legitimized
the drastic actions of abolishing the warrior government and the
shōgun – institutions that had been central in the political system of
Japan since the twelfth century. While fully exploiting the historical
authority of the imperial institution, however, the Meiji politicians fortified
it tremendously by creating a modern image of the emperor modelled
on constitutional monarchies of nineteenth-century Europe. The
major driving force behind these measures was the fear of Western
domination and the national humiliation brought about by the ‘unequal
treaties’ of 1858.
In the past, the foreign policy of Tokugawa Japan was often
explained as ‘self-imposed isolation’. Today, however, historians agree
that it would be misleading to characterize the foreign relations of the
Tokugawa government as such in view of Japan’s continuous interaction
with Asia during the pre-modern period. 11 The main reason for emphasizing
its ‘seclusion’ was the inability of Western countries to conduct ‘free
trade ’ in Japan. A series of edicts issued during the 1630s banned all
Westerners from the country, except for a handful of Dutch who were
allowed to take residence on a tiny outpost of Deshima (or Dejima) in
Nagasaki Bay, in the far western corner of the country. Only officially
sanctioned trade and travel were tolerated by the authorities, which gave
the latter full control and authority. The missionary activities of the
Portuguese and Spanish between the 1540s and 1620s and a potential threat
that the spread of Christianity among Japanese posed for the bakufu were
the main motives behind the decision to break off ties with the ‘West’ in
the early seventeenth century.
There is no doubt that the foreign policy of the Tokugawa regime
protected Japan from Western powers, whose quest for profit and territory
in Asia became increasingly pronounced in the late eighteenth century. In
1854, however, Japan’s resistance to Western encroachment was broken.
Under a threat of the use of military power, a fleet of nine American ships
under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry was allowed to dock
in Edo bay. In 1858 the bakufu was forced to sign the infamous ‘unequal
treaties’ with the Five Nations (the United States, Great Britain, France,
Russia and the Netherlands), which in the following years were extended
to include other European countries. The treaties came into effect the fol-
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